Open-Source ATI R600/700 Mesa 3D Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source ATI R600/700 Mesa 3D Performance

As we alluded to last week, we have been in the process of benchmarking many Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards using the open-source ATI Linux graphics stack with the Mesa R600/700 DRI driver. We have now carried out our first batch of R600/700 3D tests using this constantly evolving open-source driver to provide OpenGL acceleration and here are the results.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14575

[bridgman]

That's interesting - I would have expected the HD3650 and HD2600 to be relatively close in performance, but the 3650 seemed to be quite a bit faster across the board. Was there anything "special" about the 2600 - I'm sure you would have mentioned if it was AGP

[misiu_mp]

You can obviously see that tremoulus is bottlenecked somewhere else than the graphics performance. The framerates stay the same on most resolutions for most of the cards.
The results arent much dependent on the performance of the graphics card alone (all 48xx lines are virtually identical).
This is so obvious, Mike should have commented on this, instead of just saying "Tremoulus is more demanding". Something else is afoot there.

[agd5f]

Something is definitely fishy with the HD2600 results. The Xv and mesa code is more or less identical for all the r6xx chips and there are no aspects of that code that require more CPU on one asic compared to another. I can see the gpu performance being somewhat variable, but the cpu usage shouldn't vary much.

[bolzerrr]

Interesting would be to compare those Result with fglrx results

[TeoLinuX]

I thought that my HD3650 would have been nearer to the HD3850... it's almost half the performance!
It's quite a low level rather than a mid-range! (at its times I mean... nowadays it ain't even worth considering). ok, I bought it as a low budget transition card, but still...

I've been following Phoronix for quite a long time, but I didn't get that open source drivers are 3D capable in R600/700
They're even capable of running games. I guess that 3D performance is lower than fglrx... but what about quality comparison? and features?

[colo]

Am I the only one who thinks the graphing of the results is absolutely abhorrent? To get any valuable information out of the mess that is, for example, the GL and XV video performance graphs, they should have been at least two times their size. It'd also be nice to have access to the numeric data in tabular form as an option. More often than not, I'd like to compare numbers instead of trying hard to figure out which shade of $colour represents which card…

[Wyatt]

Wait, you don't like some of the results so you won't show them? What the heck!

It would be nice to know if things have failed miserably or are not sufficiently different to even see a difference, too, you know: you even already have all the data.

[Wizard]

I think the performance of the OpenGL stuff is miserabel, because I have also Mesa 7.7 installed and Nexuiz is only playable with low details and resolution. With fglrx I was able to play 1680X1050 with the highest detail level. I hope Mesa 7.8 will bring good OpenGL performance to R600 cards.

[Michael]

That's interesting - I would have expected the HD3650 and HD2600 to be relatively close in performance, but the 3650 seemed to be quite a bit faster across the board. Was there anything "special" about the 2600 - I'm sure you would have mentioned if it was AGP

Of course not, I haven't touched AGP in years. It's just a standard HD 2600PRO.